If a film is really good, it holds my attention completely as I’m watching it. If it’s not, I start mentally writing the review before the end credits. Firmly in the latter category is “Beyond the Lights” (the black pop star saved by a black bodyguard/cop movie that’s getting rave reviews and white critics saying it’s “underrated,” perhaps because they’re relieved to watch a psychosexual race-baiting film not produced by Tyler Perry).
I could probably write 20 paragraphs about this film’s murky cultural politics, it’s patronizingly hollow message about fame, and how it’s adrift in racial cowardice. No matter how you slice it, this is probably the most dishonest movie I’ve seen this year, and a sure-fire contender to be in the bottom 10 of the year list.
I’m skipping the typical review format to lay out an argument for why I disliked it so much (although it would really take a novella’s worth of words to fully explain it): from the opening scene—wherein an unlikable white mother takes her bi-racial daughter to a hair saloon to “fix her hair” because she doesn’t know the first thing about black hair—the message is very clear: this movie will play to preconceived prejudices about interracial relationships (familial, romantic, business) first, and realism second. It’s message isn’t “we’re all the same, so let’s move past our differences” so much as “stick with your own tribe if you want to find happiness.”
It has not one, not two, not three, but four villainous white characters that black/Hispanic characters are worse off for being around: a pushy stage mother who puts fame above her black hip-hop star daughter (there is a subtle slavery undertone to her business-first relationship with her daughter, and the movie’s assertion she practically pimps her out for publicity and money), a jerk white rapper boyfriend dating said pop star (you know, because there’s so many of them dating white guys), a white record executive that “doesn’t get it,” and an abusive white husband the black hero cop has to thwart in order to save a Hispanic wife and step-kids.
Forgetting that there has never been a black pop star pushed into fame by a nasty white stage mother or one that dated an abusive white rapper, the movie acts like it wants to say something about the over-sexualization of female singers but then keeps copping out. From watching this film, you wouldn’t think black men ran the hip-hop business at all or were the ones headlining the sexualized music videos. In fact, there’s not even one moment where one so much as leers at the lead character inappropriately. [And for all the villainy of the lead character’s mother, there is exactly one mention of her absentee black father: by the mother. The lead doesn’t seem to care that she never met him or even mentions this as doing any damage to her.]
Then we get to the messages of having a dark-skinned, church-going good guy “save” the light-skinned heroine by taking her out for greasy fast food fried chicken (that’s right, fried chicken), being proud of her for covering up, and the ultimate cliche for showing a black female character progressing: taking her weave out. That’s right, a suicidal bi-racial heroine finds happiness by distancing herself from all white people she’s associating with at the beginning of the movie, and becoming blacker with a guy she can eat fried chicken with. How are other reviewers not calling this shit out for being beyond patronizing?
Never mind that the two characters have honestly nothing in common. She’s British and grew up in London, and he’s never been on a plane before. He knows literally nothing about music/anything she’s interested in, while she can’t exactly seem knowledgeable about American politics or anything he’s interested in. She shows him all this cool stuff she owns, then they have sex, and talk as little as possible, but he listens to her when she starts bringing up this Blackbird song she mentions roughly 200 times in the movie as if her character depth depends on it. [We keep hearing about how she’s written these amazing lyrics…and then only see her do different covers of Nina Simone’s “Blackbird” to prove she’s got the goods.]
They forge the shallowest of connections that seems centered on him saving her from a suicide attempt, and a better movie might have had them waking up to the fact that there really isn’t anything to them beyond the savior-savee dynamic. Imagine a movie where the lead guy realizes she’s more interested in being rescued than in really getting to know him and she realizes having him around is a way of not being the one to fix herself and she should do it on her own.
And rescue her from what exactly? The movie never makes that entirely clear. We know she’s depressed and unhappy with the direction her career is going in, but her existential crisis feels naggingly abstract, like something that’s happening because it has to trigger the plot more than something we can really feel. And the movie has an all-too-cliched message about losing yourself in fame, and a better film might have at least acknowledged that it must be a thrill to some extent. It might even be daring enough to show her enjoying it since, uhhhh, you know, most professional musicians kinda, sorta do love it.
Example: There’s a scene late in the movie where they’ve fled to Mexico and a couple doesn’t recognize her without her tight clothes or blue hair extensions. She thinks they want a picture with her, but they really just want her to take a picture of them. A more interesting movie would have shown that this bothers her to an extent, and that might have shown the problems of this character on a deeper level than just her telling us she’s depressed. But that would be a movie with a better message than “Hey, you’re depressed? Why not implode your career, drop off the face, and go hang out with some guy? Why not let him fix your problems by being with him, not talking that much, and pretending it’s not your life’s passion to be a famous singer?”
In the end, this film isn’t a realistic depiction of the music business, it’s not an original love story, you can guess everything that’s going to happen a half hour before it does, and it really only succeeds as a nefariously subconscious race piece that plays to an audience that’s just looking for confirmation on stereotypes they should be outgrowing, not reinforcing.